1. Technical Field
The present disclosure relates to clusters of media items and more specifically to generating media mixes based on clusters of media items.
2. Introduction
Before the age of compressed media files such as MPEG, ACC, WMA media was stored on magnetic tapes and later compact discs (CDs). Especially with reference to music media files, consumers typically bought music media as albums comprising several music tracks. Frequently these albums contained tracks which a listener would associate with varying degrees of enjoyment, either because of the suitability of the individual track to the listener's tastes or the listener's present listening mood.
This frequently led to the situation where the tracks a listener would like to listen to were scattered over several or even many albums. Motivated by this situation, user's commonly created “mixes” of their favorite audio tracks or “mixes” of audio tracks that were similar and therefore sounded great when played together on the same tape or compact disc.
To create these mixes, users had to have great knowledge of all of the tracks in their collection. Further users had to record each track from its original media onto another media. Often user's spent hours listening to tracks to determine which tracks could fit on the limited space of a tape or CD and to determine the order.
Today many media consumers buy individual tracks rather than buy complete albums. Also users today often listen to a greater number of tracks in their library since their entire collection can fit on one device instead of many tapes or CDs.
Despite this relative convenience of having access to every track in their media library at any time and being able to access each track with a scroll and a click, listener's still create mixes of tracks, often in the form of playlists. However, creating these mixes is still time consuming processes requiring a great deal of user interaction and many user decisions. Accordingly there is a need to eliminate the burden on the listener while still creating high quality mixes.